Coming into the Country (50 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Amundsen remembered his two months in Eagle as a “cherished” and “pleasant” time. The cabin he lived in belonged to Frank Smith, the manager of the Alaska Commercial Company store. It is still here. The main part is only twelve feet wide and fourteen deep, with two extensions out the back that make it long and narrow, like the Gjöa. Only the name of the street it is on has changed. The cabin is just off First Avenue, on Amundsen.
Amundsen had heroes, his own capacity for awe. He met such a person on his way back to his ship. He departed Eagle
February 3rd (leaving Fix, one of his sled dogs, behind, because Fix had gorged himself on the provender of Eagle and was a useless ball of fat). He retraced his route, rejoined his two Eskimo companions in Fort Yukon, and had gone maybe a hundred miles up the Porcupine when he saw one day a dark, solitary speck on the distant snow. It moved toward him. An hour later, the gap closed, and he met a man named Darrell, who was hauling a small toboggan by hand. Darrell worked for the Hudson's Bay Company, and he was carrying mail. He had come from the Arctic Ocean and had crossed the mountains alone, because an unusually heavy snowfall on the North Slope was too deep for dogs. “I could not believe my eyes,” Amundsen wrote in one book. “Here was a man, hundreds of miles from the nearest human being, with not a soul to aid him in case of illness or accident, cheerfully trudging through the Arctic winter across an unblazed wilderness, and thinking nothing at all of his exploit. I was lost in admiration.” And in another book he said, “I stood looking after him as he disappeared from view, and I thought, if you got together a few more men of his stamp, you could get to the moon.”
 
 
 
The riverboats that stopped at the port of Eagle were sternwheelers of the Mississippi style, with curtained saloons and decks for strolling and wood piled high on their bows. They burned a cord an hour. They ran until mid-century. “It's a dirty shame they ever stopped,” says Barney Hansen, who well remembers them. “If they'd quit giving so much money to foreign countries and kept the steamboats on the river for God's people to run in, it would have been wonderful, but they didn't.” The Sarah, the Yukon, the Lavelle Young—there were dozens of them, and they tied up at Eagle, their company flags and thick smoke flying, intense in their competition: Northern
Commercial versus North American Trading & Transportation. They could be heard miles away, their big pistons thumping. Al Stout, who now works claims on American Creek, came into the country working on such a vessel, and it cured him of riverboats forever. His bunk was in the stern, directly above the thump. He worked six hours on and six off, with additional duty at every wood stop and every port. He fell asleep in any slack moment, wherever on the boat he might be. His pay was two dollars a day. He got off at Eagle, and stayed off, to become a miner—a relatively easeful occupation.
One-way tickets on the steamers were blue. They were not always bought by the people who used them. They were sometimes bought by the community. In Council meeting on December 13, 1909, for example, the “matter of relieving the town of Otto Strom was generally discussed and it was arranged to start him down the river.” His offense was assault and battery—obviously even a heavier crime than prostitution, for no blue ticket had been forthcoming when the Fort Egbert surgeon, earlier that year, discovered that Gertrude Carson was suffering from v.d. The commanding officer requested that the community banish Ms. Carson, because she was a menace to the health and discipline of the troops. Two months later, though, she was allowed to reopen, provided she keep “sober and clean, and a respectable place in her line.” Her cabin was in the western half of Block 18 on C Street, where, in a move to clean up First Avenue, all prostitutes had been consigned a year before (and where all the cabins are gone and a grove of aspens quakes today). Those were milestone times for Eagle. The windmill was shipped in, with a bill for almost twelve hundred dollars. And a package arrived that killed Fort Egbert dead. In it was a wireless transmitter, and all the work of Billy Mitchell, five years after its completion, was in the instant obsolete.
By 1910, nothing was going out on the wire. In 1911, the War Department closed the Army post. Forty-five buildings
had been built, and a water-supply line from American Creek. At intervals through the woods, this water line passed over fires that kept it fluid twenty-four hours a day. The soldiers burned three thousand cords of wood a year. When they departed forever, Eagle was balder than Kansas, and six thousand stacked cords stayed after them to rot. Regulations prohibited the departing soldiers from giving or selling materials to local people, so they ignited a pyre of coonskin coats—two hundred coonskin coats—and they threw their rifles into the Yukon.
A few years ago, Tom Scott, of Eagle, took a job in the Washington office of Alaska's Senator Mike Gravel. On a lunch hour, he happened into the Library of Congress, and could not believe what he saw—“all that material there to be used.” He looked up “Fort Egbert” and was soon directed to the National Archives, where he found plats and photographs and records—a trove unknown in Eagle. Much of Fort Egbert had long since disappeared—the gymnasium, with its basketball court; the post exchange and commissariat; the veranda-bordered barracks, so odd and Southwestern—but the N.C.O. quarters were still standing, and the enormous mule barn, the quartermaster warehouse, the granary, the water-wagon shed, not to mention various ruins with outlines intact. Scott called a friend named Gerald Timmons in the Bureau of Land Management. What could be done in the way of restoration and preservation? Timmons told him to write certain letters on Gravel's stationery and ask Gravel to sign them. The first letter went to the Bureau of Land Management. As a citizen of Eagle, and without revealing his employment with Gravel, Scott went to Senator Ted Stevens, of the opposite party. The Senator asked Scott, who was twenty years old, what a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could do. “We were so naive. With a hundred and fifty thousand, we figured we'd have a Williamsburg here.” The Fort Egbert restoration was soon in the B.L.M. budget for seventy thousand dollars, to be repeated annually. To preserve buildings in the city, twenty-five thousand
was provided by the state and matched by the National Park Service—a deal engineered by “Gravel.” The Seabees were sent in to work on the mule barn. They were transported by the National Guard. Eagle is indeed becoming a far-northern Williamsburg, to the particular wonder of young Tom Scott, who says, “It's just amazing. I can't believe it. So many resources are
available.”
 
 
 
When Jim and Elva Scott, Tom's parents, came into the country to settle, in the early nineteen-seventies, they paused on the hill above Eagle and reminded each other that they had lived in many Alaskan bush communities, and with regard to this one they wished to share a firm resolution: in its politics they would not become involved. A couple of years later, he was impeached as mayor. The tattle says “impeached.” The word is a shade strong. He resigned, at any rate, in foul humor, and a majority of the Council enthusiastically approved. His initial act had been to kill the opening prayer. It was while he was on the Council that the preponderance of the religious bloc came to an end. When members of the Bible Chapel hopefully asked him if he would come to a Scripture reading, he mentioned his atheism and said he might have “little to contribute.” His principal offense, though, if such it was, seems to have been the advice and support he gave his son in the effort to preserve and restore the fort and the town.
“They made deals with the government—him and Tom—regarding the designation of historic sites, which require approval by the city. None was given.”
“Eagle was in the National Register of Historic Places for two years before the city found out it was.”
“When Eagle was changed from a First Class to a Second Class City, he executed the papers without notifying the
Council. He did not acquaint the people with appeals procedures.”
“Recently, he has said that the city should be abolished, due to excessive taxation. He says the public well should be closed and abandoned.”
“He thinks the Bureau of Land Management could run Eagle better than the Council.”
“I don't like his ways. He wants the town government out of here. He's a Communist.”
“Show me the card. But I'll buy Socialist—and I don't think we need any in Eagle.”
“He's such a wide person. He has so much of everything. But at times he does not listen to other people's ideas.”
“The people of the Indian Village respect him. I respect him.”
Jim Scott is a big man, angry and funny, his face alive with wit. He is a forester, now retired from long federal service. He is the salt and the pepper of Alaska. He is my neighbor, and, while I am here, my landlord. The two cabins are back to back. We split our wood against the same log. I watch from my window to encounter him there. He sets the axe down, puts a boot up, looks out over the Yukon, and says, “When I came here, I was, in effect, seeking the philosophical outlook of our Founding Fathers—you know what I mean?—here in this great and glorious community.” He lifts the axe. “The town is corroded with ne'er-do-wells,” he says. Chop. “It is, in effect, Forest Lawn for the living.” Chop. Chop.
His eyes are owlish, because snowlight blinded him once, burned his corneas. He has a beardless, broad face, suggesting honesty—the face of an overweight hawk. I remember thinking when I first saw him that he looked a lot like George Washington—a Washington caught by a cannier Peale, with a slicing edge in his demeanor, as if someone had just put a question to him concerning his expense account. As an “administrative forester,” he made patterned journeys across hundreds
of miles of Territorial Alaska, by float plane, by canoe, by snowshoe. In his “idiot bag” he carried forms and applications—for homesteads, cabin sites, “headquarters sites” for bush endeavors—and he tried to educate people in the responsibilities of living on public estate, so they could stay within the rules, legalize their occupancy, prove up. He became their friend. He willingly brought them supplies—hams, snares, traps, shells, sugar, flour, medicine—when they sent him lists and asked the favor. He ate and slept in their cabins, and he always paid. He paid five or six dollars to roll out his sleeping bag, and two for any meal. There were no exceptions. “I didn't want so much as a piece of pie hanging over my head.” Chop.
For a time, the family's cabin was in Homer, on Kachemak Bay. He would fly to Kenai, and walk the roadless miles home —seventy by airline, upward of a hundred on foot. One night, after snowshoeing a good distance at thirty below zero, he stopped at a cabin, tired. He said he would sleep on the floor, but the people insisted that he sleep in a bed with their children—a small boy and a small girl. The boy wet the bed all night. His sister kept warning him he was going to get spanked. Jim just lay there between them, floating on his back in a lake of urine, saying nothing. “It beggared description” is what he says now. “In effect, it was enough to pale the Pope.” He uses exactly the same terms to summarize his experiences on the higher levels of bureaucracy.
When he had risen in the world, up out of the fun and into the shuffling paper—when he had become district manager, based in Anchorage, and in charge of half Alaska—he dealt regularly with, among others, people of the petroleum industry. They invited him for cocktails. “I never darkened their door. I avoided them like the bubonic plague. It made it so much easier to deal with the sons of bitches.” It seems possible that if Jim Scott had ever cut down a cherry tree, he would have reported it, and would not have had to be asked.

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